Wolff on Selig

“There’s one thing I don’t think enough people realize about Bud,” Wolff said. “He knows that baseball is the players. Whether he reacted soon enough to the steroid situation or not, once he did react, it was still a fight with the union. And it shouldn’t have been a fight. If there’s anybody who puts baseball first, it’s Bud. And I don’t say this just because I went to school with him.”

He’s right. He’s also saying it because he’s probably going to ask Bud to strong-arm the Giants out of San Jose in the next couple of months too!

Comments

I read some more contraction nonsense in one of the MSM outlets this morning. The theory being that the A’s attendance will be down 20% this year, and the stadium is just too ugly, etc.., etc.. etc…

If the Beloved A’s were fielding the same bunch they put on the diamond last year, along with their usual ticket price increase, I’d say yeah, a decline is likely. But 20%? That puts them in the 15,000/game range. Not likely.

But this is a better team on paper, offensively anyway, than last year. And they did not raise ticket prices. Yes the economy has really hit the A’s geographic fan base (East Bay) hard, but if they get off to even a decent start with their young pitchers this could be a fun team to watch. In that case there might even be a slight increase in attendance.

The stadium is still ugly though, so the sooner Bud gets to strong armin’, the better.

I’m having trouble giving Wolffe the benefit of the doubt here. On the face of it, he’s defending Bud Selig. But he’s also defending himself, and he’s doing it by shifting the blame onto the players (for taking PEDs and fighting against testing) and the media (for reporting on PEDs instead of “focusing on baseball”). He sounds a lot like every other beneficiary of the steroids era: pointing fingers at other people and protesting his own innocence.

Like Mr. Wolffe, I would love to focus on this season, instead of dwelling on the sordid past. But the fastest route to resolution isn’t blame shifting. It’s accepting our share of the responsibility and honestly working to do better in the future. If Mr. Wolffe is any indication, we’re gonna be dealing with new PED scandals for a very, very long time.